


Peripheral

by Lopfe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hallucinations, Horror, Shadow people, Supernatural - Freeform, Suspense, if you're a nervous person you should read this in daylight, john is quite possibly losing his mind, sherlocktoberfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 09:06:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4516047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lopfe/pseuds/Lopfe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John notices something from out of the corner of his eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peripheral

“Sherlock, where the hell have you been?”

It was one of those horrible days in autumn, where the wind has it in for you and throws leaf litter and footpath dust up into your eyes. No matter which direction you turn your head. Detective Inspector Lestrade looked like he'd copped the worst of it, or at least had caught the seasonal 'flu. He was wrapped up more snugly than Sherlock was (and how I wished I could afford to be but for my army pension) eyes red-rimmed and nose shiny. He sniffed as if to confirm my observations, then glared at the two of us. He wasn't at all impressed by Sherlock's insistence at stopping by some other crime scene, instead of racing directly to Lestrade's like the DI expected. But, as with all things pertaining to Sherlock, they happened in his time or not at all.

Sherlock was his usual self, dispensing with polite greetings and cutting directly to the chase - or rather the berating of the police force, and of Sergeant Anderson in particular. The two of them got into their familiar game of name-calling before Sherlock grew impatient, made the usual deduction, and strode into the flat. Anderson was left standing outside, red-faced and embarrassed. I suppose that normally I would have felt sorry for someone being so thoroughly torn apart by my flatmate, but in that instance I found it hard to manifest pity. It wasn't as if it was an irregular occurrence; Anderson engaged Sherlock in verbal duels almost on sight so he couldn't claim ignorance of the outcome.

The result of this however, was that when I joined Sherlock in the top floor flat we were pretty much left to ourselves. Lestrade had granted us his usual three minute allotment, and Sherlock and I made the most of our inspection. The world's one and only consulting detective gestured me over to the unfortunate dead person while he occupied himself with the dressing table.

It wasn't hard to tell how the young woman had died. Three stab wounds to the chest, knife still buried in the last. An experimental nudge of the handle let me know that it was lodged hard against bone, just enough resistance to make a loose grip slip free, especially with the handle being so bloody. And there was a lot of blood. The heart may still have been beating even after the second strike. I was relating all of this out loud despite Sherlock's apparent disinterest and humming and haa-ing over by the wardrobe--he listens even when he appears not to--when a flicker out of the corner of my eye had me cutting off mid-sentence.

You know that feeling you get when somebody is watching you? And I don't mean just the sensation of their eyes on you, or that little itch at the back of your neck. I mean looking at you, with _intent_. 

I'll never forget that feeling; not in a million years. I felt it when I was an idiot kid walking home from the theatre at night, a few minutes before I was mugged at knifepoint. Then on and off all throughout my time in Afghanistan. It was strong just before our convoy was hit by an IED. Another occasion I could literally feel the eyes and the muzzle of the gun on me for ten seconds before I was shot, though the sniper was sheltered in a building over 100 meters away. It was how I knew, now, that someone was watching me. It was why, without thinking, I was rolling away from the deceased and behind the unmade bed. I was reaching for the gun I did not bring at the same time I was dragging Sherlock down beside me, the fingers of my left hand tangled in his coat and twisting beneath the weight of his body as he fell. 

I cursed myself later. Loudly and vituperously, because I don't know how I could have gotten it wrong. I knew that feeling well, _knew_ it like I know the layout of our flat, yet where I had seen the silhouette--definitely a man--lurking by the bathroom door, there was now nothing. My right arm was extended out in front of me but the hand was empty, which was probably a good thing as my index finger was cramping with tension. I might just have shot up the bathroom of a crime scene without really thinking about it, and for something that wasn't even there. Of course I didn't know that at the time, so still operating under the assumption that there was a person of ill-intent lurking in the bathroom of a murdered woman, I yanked my other arm out from under Sherlock and made for the open door. I was expecting to find a man in dark clothing hightailing it out a window or something. What I didn't expect was to find nothing. The bathroom was completely empty, and the room was one of those interior ones with a tiny circular skylight instead of a window. To say I felt disappointed in myself would be an understatement.

Sherlock was at my shoulder before I could even begin to berate myself, giving me the once over he gave to people he had only just met, and leaving me feeling a little cold in its wake. Then he blinked slowly, and his eyes when they met mine held that look. That 'God, how could you be so dense' look, and without saying anything returned to his investigation of the wardrobe.

I'm not sure what was worse at the time. My own self doubt as I stood there in the doorway to the empty bathroom with my left hand quiescent and heart pounding, or Sherlock's nonchalance at something so momentously bad. I don't think he understood just how horrible a thing it was to have your senses betray you like that. I found I couldn't return to my inspection of the deceased woman with anything resembling calm. However, I was saved from attempting to do so by Lestrade calling 'time' and getting everything he could out of Sherlock before escorting us out. 

I was glad to leave the scene of my breakdown, as I was thinking of calling it. For even though I had checked the room, and had seen with my own eyes that there was nowhere in that spartan bathroom to hide a child let alone a full-grown man, I could still feel eyes on me. 

“What a momentous waste of my time,” Sherlock declared minutes later. We were in the cab back to Baker Street before he even opened his mouth to talk to me. The weight of those unseen eyes was finally, thankfully, gone.

“You've solved it then.”

Not a question. Of course he had. He had probably figured it out while he was arguing with Anderson, only needing a peer-in at the bedroom to confirm the details. “Then why did you tell Lestrade all that stuff about the shoes, if you already knew?”

“John, use your brain. How are they to learn my techniques if they don't practice them?”

“So, what. That was a... a _teaching aid?_ ”

“Of sorts.”

We bantered like this all the way back to our flat, and I was relieved that not once did Sherlock bring up my 'episode' at the crime scene. I was still puzzling it out. There wasn't any way I could put it into words coherent enough for Sherlock to do anything with, and I still couldn't figure out why I had acted that way, either. How could I have mistaken the feeling of killing intent? It's not as if it's as easy as buying the wrong brand of milk at Tesco's. 

I should have taken it as a sign, really, that even though I couldn't feel his eyes anymore, it didn't mean that he had left me alone. 

Two hours after we'd gotten home, he arrived at our flat. 

When I say 'arrived', I don't mean knocking on the front door and being shown up to our rooms by Mrs. Hudson like all of our other clients. I mean he sneaked in, covert and silent, like the secret service guys I had the occasion to meet in Afghanistan who were all smooth lines and enviable quiet menace. One second there was nothing but a chair and an end table, and the next there was something else.

I felt the eyes on me first. A rush of gooseflesh that swept out from the back of my neck and down my spine, the skin over my skull constricting too tight. My body reacted instinctively to those eyes, tensing up and shifting weight, heart rate increasing, senses alert. It was familiar. Too familiar.

Sight was confirmed by a flicker in the corner of my right eye. My corresponding hand immediately struck up with a fierce itch, and I cursed myself an idiot for leaving my gun in the safe on the table on the _complete opposite side of the room_. But I didn't consider that he would follow us home. In fact, I'd begun to doubt that I ever saw him at all. 

Sherlock was in the kitchen, banging around with something. He'd been in there a while, and the man was too close, the eyes on my back too cold to risk shouting for him. I tried to move nonchalantly. The gun was too far, but there was a lamp right beside me. It would do in a pinch to throw.

I was quick. Quicker than I've been since my injury, I know. Maybe as quick as I've ever been. But the shadowy man was quicker. I grabbed the lamp, spinning around and hauling back like I was going to throw to a line-out, and already he was gone. 

I don't know how long I must have stood there like that, with my arm up in the air, clutching at an ugly lamp and probably looking like a right knob. A minute, maybe. My arm hurt when I finally brought it down, but my heart was still pounding and it was difficult to breathe. The man had just vanished. Not run off, not gone and hidden himself upstairs or downstairs or in the foyer-- I'd have seen him if he'd done that. No, he'd just plain vanished. Dissolved. I didn't even get a look at his face. I wasn't even sure he _had_ a face, though he must have had eyes because how could I feel them if they weren't there?

Actually, how sure was I that this was a man?

How sure was I that this was actually human?

How sure was I that this wasn't actually all in my head?

Not sure. Not sure at all. My senses were playing peek-a-boo with me as if I were a child.

I'm afraid I broke that ugly lamp when it dropped out of my suddenly lax hand. I used the time cleaning it up and ignoring Sherlock's drilling stare to calm myself down, and to talk myself through what it was that I had supposedly seen. Maybe it was nothing. Eyelashes catching dust or something. Might not have anything to do with my so-called PTSD at all. I would just have a couple of aspirin for the headache that was about to blaze its way across my skull and go to bed. It would be better when I woke up. Maybe I was just having a bad day. 

When I awoke it must have been late afternoon. We weren't so far into autumn yet that my breath was frosting in the air, but it was cold enough to require extra blankets on the bed. The yellow light of a low sitting sun was pouring in through the gap in the curtains, but it didn't warm my small room any. My headache was blissfully gone, and my bladder uncomfortably full. I was just contemplating getting up for the loo when there was a shifting in the corner of my vision. The door slipped open slowly, and my paranoia rushed back with an audible howl of blood in my ears. Someone was standing in the doorway to my room. My head snapped around, hand slipping beneath my pillow for a gun I had forgotten to take with me _yet again_ , but it was only Sherlock. 

He was eyeing me strangely still, an almost constant look from him since the crime scene, and I decided that the gun was going to stay in the safe. I couldn't risk carrying it around when I was this jumpy. 

“I'm hungry,” he said.

I groaned into my pillow, a mixture of nerves and profound relief relaxing the muscles of my abdomen and pelvic floor enough to put me in great danger of pissing myself. “Then make something.”

“We're going out.”

I knew he was only going to lurk in my room until I agreed to go out with him. But my bladder was so full, and I was so unaccountably relieved that it was _Sherlock_ , and not some other thing in my doorway, that I had to take my time to get up. Otherwise I was going to make an embarrassing mess of my bed the like I hadn't made since they took the catheter out in Afghanistan.

“I'll be with you in a minute,” I groaned.

“You have three.”

And he thought he was being generous. Ha. 

 

 

For someone who woke me up proclaiming that he was hungry, he sure indulged in his appetite. Three cups of coffee. It was a step up from the absolute nothing he'd nibbled at the previous times we'd gone out to eat.

The sun had set about half an hour ago, and a chill wind had struck up. The streetlights were highlighting the fallen leaves as they flicked up and out into darkness outside of the restaurant window. It was a stark reminder that winter was on its way and of the musculature pain I had to look forward to when it got really cold.

Eventually, I gave up on being silent.

“Why are we here?”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“We have a case.” He gave me the 'please elaborate' look and I indulged him. “You're not eating. You don't eat when you're working. You've dragged me out here, even though I was sleeping. You're not normally courteous about that anyway, but no doubt you noticed that I'm not my... um... usual self. You'd have left me behind if you could. So what is it?”

The smile he gave me chased away any vestige of worry that was still lurking around from before my nap. I thought that, yes, the day might actually end on a good note.

And if the edge of my vision sometimes blurred with a dark shadow, I didn't think about it. A couple of fast blinks sometimes cleared it up, and the adrenaline took care of the rest. It was a windy night, and there were a lot of people out. Shadows were everywhere. 

 

 

The case went fine. Bloody brilliantly, actually. Just a little bit of the usual clandestine b&e, snoop, deduce, and flee that Sherlock especially seemed to get a kick out of. More so if it involved running. Which it did, though I'm still not exactly sure why he found it necessary to run from a little old man. He had a walker, for pity's sake. And the thickest lenses I've ever seen outside of a 70s episode of Coro Street. It would have been a miracle for him to even spot that there were two of us from where he was standing across the road, but Sherlock seemed to find him deathly suspicious nevertheless. That was enough to get us pelting for home. In the cab Sherlock text-messaged Lestrade with his observations, and the DI's response led to Sherlock getting dropped off at the Yard while I continued on home. Once upstairs in my favourite chair, lights off and television on, I contented myself with some crap late night telly.

You can see where this is going, can't you? Me, alone in a dark flat, nerves already rather shaky. Yeah, not good.

I think I must have zoned out at some point, caught in the quagmire between awake and asleep, when something dragged at the edge of my awareness. I don't know what it was. A sound, maybe? A touch? A memory of flares and of popping, dredged up from my dreaming subconscious? Whatever it was had me starting, immediately awake.

And absolutely terrified. 

I know all about night terrors. I used to suffer them as a child every time I went through a growth spurt, but I'd never felt so scared as I did right then. Not in the middle of an insurgent attack, nor with a gun bruising the flesh under my jaw and a hand fisting too efficiently in my short hair. Not with a knife against my ribs, or a poisoned pill held barely a hairsbreadth from my closest friend's lips. My diaphragm had seized so I couldn't breathe and my limbs, dead and numb with dread, hung limply from my shoulders. My heart pumped utterly useless adrenaline through my body with a furious arrhythmic tempo that only served to terrify me more.

And in the corner of my eye, juddering and flickering like an image from a silent film, was the shadow.

It lingered in the dark doorway to the kitchen. I'd left the sliding doors partly open after making tea, and the flickering from the television lit the glass up brightly with reflections. I suppose I could have easily mistaken the shadow for actual shadows cast by any number of things in our sitting room, if it hadn't been for the totally contrary nature of its jarring presence. As if to be vindictive, its own flickering ran counterpoint to the television's. Its utter darkness stood out like a bruise on a corpse.

Then I noticed it was getting closer.

I was trapped in my chair by my own paralyzing fear; unable to talk, unable to breathe, unable to even turn my head and make the thing go away as I had all the times previous. And utterly unable to look away. At some point, while watching that shadowy figure grow nearer yet never move from the edge of my vision, I realised that I had to still be half-asleep. Sleep paralysis, it had to be. I'd never been so scared that I _couldn't move_ before. Couldn't _breathe_.

I had to do something to break it, otherwise I could suffocate right there in my chair, a stupid, pointless death that wouldn't entertain Sherlock for a single moment. It was possible. People didn't always start breathing again once they'd fallen unconscious.

_“Died of fright,”_ Sherlock would say, staring down at my body with that blank, depressed look he got when things were proving banal. _“How boring.”_ I could see the disappointed look on his face all too clearly, as if I had snatched away the greatest mystery before he had even had a chance to get excited about it. In my imagination, it hurt more than it should to have that look directed at me. Especially a dead me.

_Make a noise, John,_ I told myself, unable to stare directly at the shadow even as it drew up to my chair and spread over a quarter of the vision in my left eye. Thick and dense like oil, it was. _Make a noise, any noise. This isn't real. Break it, break it, break it._

And when I saw it reach for me, an impression of a hand with thick, long fingers, the muscles in my thighs jerked violently, convinced that I was already running. With no air with which to whimper, and no strength in my arms, I don't know how I managed to throw myself out of the chair.

The shock was what I needed. The impact jolted my lungs back into action, and my hearing abruptly cleared, having been completely unaware that it had even gone. I must have lay there on the floor, gasping for breath like a landed fish for a good minute or two, struggling to keep a crying jag from getting its claws into me. My jaw throbbed and I could taste blood. I didn't even bother to look for the shadow. I knew it wasn't going to be there.

 

 

I came to the conclusion forty minutes later, after scanning the indices of all my text books and googling 'shadow figures' like a mad man, that the world was insane. And that I was stressed and most likely dealing with apophenia. Having a psychosomatic limp and nightmares was one thing. Hallucinating shadowy people in my peripheral vision and then freaking out enough to _stop breathing_ was quite another. And it was a hallucination, I decided. 

Those people who thought the shadow things were aliens were clearly insane. Clearly. 

And Sherlock was right about Wikipedia. The articles were all written by idiots.

 

 

I sort of became numb to its presence after that. I could ignore the way it trailed me down the hall to the bathroom. Soaking in a tub, I could relax enough to close my eyes and pretend that I hadn't seen it lurking over by the vanity. Or bouncing off of the reflective surfaces of the mirror and the porcelain sink as if it couldn't decide which medium it preferred. That is, until I awoke in the middle of the night to it standing over my bed.

I lost it then. I was up and screaming at it before I was even aware of the idiocy of confronting something I wasn't sure was even there. I don't remember exactly what it was I was yelling; something about staying out of my bedroom, a lot of swearing, delineating the rules of PTSD hallucinations. And something about the hiring of an exorcist, though I wasn't entirely sure when I'd considered the possibility of it being a ghost. My tirade was mad, and even while it was going on a part of me was recording the deepening effects of my psychosis. The truly crazy part didn't come until after I ran out of things to scream at it and stood panting with spent fury in the middle of my dark bedroom, the shadow strangely still in the far corner. I glared at it, unable to meet its invisible, chilling stare directly without it blurring across my entire vision. I still can't believe that I hissed an impolite 'good night' to the thing, calmly turned away and put myself back to bed. It was like I was dealing with an errant child.

When I turned over twenty minutes later, it was gone.

However, I wasn't so lucky as to be completely free of the blasted thing. When I stepped out of my bedroom the following morning it was waiting for me on the landing, flickering a greeting from its customary place in corner of my eye. By this point I was more annoyed by its presence than scared. My panic and hissy fit in the early hours of the morning had driven all vestige of fear away.

“You stayed there all night, didn't you?” I accused it, just as Sherlock was exiting his own room. 

I don't know when he arrived home. Hopefully it was some time _after_ my middle-of-the-night breakdown, but he was giving me another of his strange looks and I began to worry that he had likely been there for the entirety.

“Good morning, Sherlock,” I forced a cheery smile onto my face, though it felt more like a grimace. I think I may have been doubting the reality of his presence at this point as well, resigning myself to being one of those crazy vets who drink on the corner from paper bags and talk to companions no one else can see. It's the only reason I can come up with for my reactions to hearing him say my name and nod his head in return.

I practically _sagged_ with the relief that rushed through me. It was almost debilitating having someone respond verbally, and not just flicker out of the corner of my eye like a bug on my eyelash. My knees physically buckled, and if the wall hadn't been at my back I'm pretty sure I'd have ended up on the floor.

Sherlock was closer then. I hadn't seen him move, but he was suddenly at my elbow, looking down at me with that expression he gets when he's figuring things out. I knew I wasn't going to be as lucky as I had been the day before. Sherlock was going to ask his questions, my comfort and privacy be damned. Though, to be fair, you can't really have either of those things when living with the worlds only consulting detective.

“John,” he started slowly. “Back at the flat yesterday. What was that?”

“It was nothing.”

And I was defensive already. Brilliant. All that relief, gone with one question. If Sherlock hadn't already been suspicious, I'd just pasted a giant billboard above my head with that response.

“You saw something.”

“It was nothing.”

“You pulled me behind the bed and reached for your gun. It wasn't 'nothing'.”

Astute observation from Sherlock in the blue corner, and I was suddenly so angry at him, bringing it up now when I was absolutely certain that I was losing my mind. And that shadow, that blasted half-there thing, shifted at the edge of my vision like it was taunting me.

“It's _nothing_. I thought I saw something. That's all. I was wrong. It was apophenia, or hypnagogia or something. It was _nothing_.”

“Pareidolia.” Sherlock said quietly, stepping in closer. His chest brushed my arm, and I could feel him breathing.

“What?” My voice came out sounding shaky, exasperated, and I didn't try to disguise it. Sherlock's tenacity, though usually quite endearing, was suddenly exhausting. Once more I was glad for the presence of the wall at my back. My wall spine, seeing as my actual bone one had wandered off somewhere without me.

“Not apophenia. Pareidolia.”

“Same thing.”

“Not-” Sherlock did one of those mid-sentence pauses, and in this instance it had me fisting my hands to keep from hitting something. “-Exactly.”

A deep breath through my nose didn't calm me at all. “I did do psych, you know.”

“Yes. I know. You left all your books out last night.”

And he read them too, no doubt.

“Then you know that pareidolia is a part of apophenia.”

“Yes. But pareidolia is specific to seeing faces and humanoid figures in static-”

“Who said anything about humanoid figures?”

“John,” and there it was, that 'how could you be so dense?' look again. Delivered so close there was barely an inch of space between our noses. “There's something else though, isn't there? It's still here. Right now. You can still see it.”

There was no use arguing anymore. It was a bloody miracle that he hadn't figured it out before then. Or maybe he had, and was only waiting for me to mention it. He was always too courteous in mentioning his observations about me. 

I swallowed, licking dry lips, determinedly trying not to look at the shadow on the stairs. “Yes.”

Sherlock's voice hushed, his chin dipped, putting his mouth in close to my ear. “Where?”

My voice lowered to match, his tone infusing me with the importance of keeping quiet, though I didn't know why. “Over my right shoulder. Third step down.”

His eyes flicked over in that direction and back again to mine so quickly I almost missed it.

“I don't see it.”

Good lord. “That's because it's _my_ hallucination, Sherlock.”

“We haven't established whether it is a hallucination or not, John.”

“Well, what else could it be?” I hissed frantically. “My aunt Beatrice?”

“Remain here.”

“Sherlock!”

He stepped fluidly around me. I stayed where I was, but kept my eyes on his back, where his hair curled against his collar. This way, I could still see the shadow, clearly outlined against the small window at its back. It was unmoving, barely flickering at all, unnaturally still. I got the impression it was waiting for something. It brought with it the feeling of mounting dread.

My eyes never left Sherlock's back as he moved further away from me. With his long legs it would take him barely four steps to put him at the same place the shadow lingered. To my horror, I watched him take five.

He stepped smoothly into the shadow.

I didn't see him step out.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sherlocktoberfest on livejournal in 2010.
> 
> Sorry for the creepy, but I did actually tone it down a little. Some of this is based on actual experience.


End file.
